Campus Health and Medical Committee is organizing weekly campus-wide screening for coronavirus from 3 February which is a joint effort by Prof. Manoj Gopalakrishnan,  IIT Bombay and Dr Kartik Tallapaka, CMB Hyderabad. Nearly 340 individuals are being tested every week.

The screening is done using a pooled testing technique called Tapestry Pooling. In this there are two tricks (a) create a pooled sample for a group of five people, and (b) use tapestry-pooling to further reduce number of tests; the first trick reduces the number of tests by factor of 5 and second reduces by a factor of 2, giving us a factor of 10 in reduction of number of tests and hence the costs. Of course, all the people in the positive tested pool will have to get one more test to identify person/s.

More information at:  https://www.tapestry-pooling.com/